by Sinclair Lewis. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 1926. 12mo. vi+302 pp. $2.00.
IN this book Mr. Lewis gives over special pleading or the analysis of a particular section of society and tells a story for its own sake. It is as if he were taking a vacation from the more serious theory and practice of his art and were writing just like an ordinary novelist rather than the author of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. The public, at least the critical public, which has learned to expect him to chloroform, label, and pin in his collection definite American types, will be disappointed by a novel from his pen which depends for its success on plot rather than on accurate, deadly observation and analysis. And it cannot be denied that Mantrap is a much slighter thing than Arrowsmith. It is an ironic fragment—not a careful, elaborate structure. It is deft, ingenious, and exciting; it moves rapidly and surely toward an unknown catastrophe which threatens from the first chapter and holds us constantly in suspense; but it is a sliver and not a slice of life, a dramatic moment, not a great human comedy — or tragedy.
For all that, I for one am heartily glad Mr. Lewis has written this book. It indicates a humanizing of his point of view, a willingness to accept men and women as they come and to present them whole, without caricature or merciless probings of their pitiful, naked souls. That fierce white light which he has turned heretofore on a selected group of inferior beings, that light so brilliant that often it has revealed neither depth nor shadows, but merely an empty and shallow surface, is here mellowed to a more comprehending illumination. I do not mean that Mr. Lewis has the understanding heart or the human sympathy of the old-school novelist. He has yet to draw a Colonel Newcome. But at least this book shows a thawing in that cold, scientific scrutiny of his, an awakening willingness to look on humanity as something, lower certainly than the angels and yet possibly possessed of souls, something at any rate different from so many male and female insects of a peculiarly self-important and frivolous species.
This story tells how a New York lawyer, Ralph Prescott, overworked and nervy, goes to the woods and wilderness north of Winnipeg with a loud-mouthed supersalesman who fancies himself as a rough, hearty, out-of-doors, manly man. Beneath his blatant condescension Prescott’s nerves are worn to ultimate thinness. In the nick of time he is rescued by a simple, straightforward trader, Joe Easter, who takes him home to his trading post, on the Mantrap River at the end of civilization. There Prescott discovers Alverna, a manicure from a Minneapolis hotel whom Joe, a year before, had met, wooed, and won in twenty-four hours and brought to this wilderness station. Against his will Prescott falls under the spell of her youth and vitality and at last discovers with horror that he is actually in love with the wife of the man who has taken him in and for whom he has developed a deep friendship. So he breaks away and leaves, only to find that Alverna has left with him, sick and tired of the wilderness and one good man. He resigns himself to the inevitable and they start their long, roundabout journey toward the railroad. Deserted by their Indian guide, and starving, they go through infinite hardships, knowing that Joe may be dose on their trail. At least they are game; one respects them. Finally Joe overtakes them and they await the inevitable killing. But not at all. Joe is anxious to save his friend Prescott from so ill-fitted and uncomfortable a mate as Alverna. She is n’t good enough for a man like him. At this point the high tension snaps. What follows is merely the working out of a very human comedy.
Every one of these chief characters, and the lesser characters as well, is superbly drawn. Clear, compelling, insistent likenesses, they stand out as genuine as Babbitt or Carol Kennicott. Only in this do they differ from earlier canvases in Mr. Lewis’s gallery: they are understood in more kindly fashion, from a deeper human experience. For that reason this slight, hurrying story marks another stage in the author’s steady growth.
RICHARD DANIELSON